WWW resource proposal

[George Fowler]

Greetings, all!
     George Mitrevski issued a compelling call to utilize WWW resources for
sharing teaching materials (and other information). I have a proposal and
would appreciate support, comment, and additional suggestions.
     Last May I wrote to Jane Gary Harris, President of AATSEEL, with a
proposal that AATSEEL establish a position of "Webmaster", to be
compensated with an honorarium at some level. This person would ideally be
a web hobbyist anyway, who would regularly spend hours of free and
not-so-free time cruising for info and maintaining his/her own links to it;
the AATSEEL mission would be to organize some of this activity along lines
useful to us and our colleagues. Jane replied encouragingly, and asked me
to put together a formal proposal for the Executive Committee meeting this
year (I'm a vice president of AATSEEL right now).
     I'll paste in below a slightly edited version of my original message
to Jane; most relevant is my sample (!) list of information that could be
incorporated. Note that some of this involves finding other information out
there, as has been done with the Bucknell, Pittsburgh REES, and other
lists; other categories would involve transferring information from other
printed or non-network computer sources; yet a third type of information
would be original to the www effort. Obviously, the last type is the least
likely to get done.
     I solicit discussions of this whole idea on SEELangs, or comments and
suggestions off-list, for incorporation into my proposal at AATSEEL. If
anyone would volunteer, I'd be happy to know that as well. Any problems
with including categories of information could also be noted. I am aware of
some; for example, my point (1) is AATSEEL directory information. However,
AATSEEL makes some money by selling its mailing list, so this might be
problematical. Whatever.
     One other thing. Jane also asked me to reconstitute and chair the
AATSEEL Committee on Educational Technology. Obviously creation of an
AATSEEL web page with teaching resources would be one meaningful step in
this area. I'd like to hear from people who would like to be involved in
this committee, and who have ideas on what the committee could/should *do*.
     George

1. PROPOSAL

AATSEEL should organize and commit to long-term maintenance of a World Wide Web
site, devoted to distribution of information pertaining to all aspects of
AATSEEL's mission, both creating repositories for new (or newly collected)
information AND aggressively seeking out and providing links to already
existing information. I feel that the page should best be maintained by someone
in our field, perhaps a committed, advanced grad student (more about this
below), rather than by a paid outsider like Alex Rudd, who maintains the
SEELangs server.

2. RAISON D'ETRE

WWW sites are absolutely exploding as a means of disseminating information
electronically. They are convenient, because existing web browsers (and they
get better every month) can make the acquisition of information practically
painless and idiot-proof. What is more, they make it possible to piggy-back on
other people's repositories, by establishing direct links to them. So if there
is a file server in Finland that maintains a collection of Cyrillic fonts for
Windows machines, as there is, rather than copy the fonts for local storage,
you can simply point to them, and by clicking at an indicated spot, the user
connected to the AATSEEL WWW page can go directly to the Finnish server,
without previously being aware of its existence or electronic address, and get
the font(s) s/he wants. WWW is therefore economical of resources. Its second
great advantage is rampant serendipity: here's a typical scenario: A person
wants to find something out, let's say, the current program for the AATSEEL
conference. S/he connects to the web page, and gets the needed information.
While there, s/he notices a list of other stuff, becomes intrigued, starts
following links, and winds up uncovering all kinds of other stuff, without even
suspecting that it existed.

3. SAMPLE RESOURCES TO INCLUDE

Here's just a sampling of the sorts of things we should include in the web
page; I think you'll agree that making all this available to the membership
(well, the entire Internet as well) would be a great service. Many other things
could be included as well; we are limited only by imagination and human
resources to incorporate things. BTW, I speak mainly of Russian in the points
below, but I mean all Slavic/E. European languages, of course.

1. Information about AATSEEL: a regularly updated, on-line version of the
membership directory; information about membership, SEEJ subscriptions, etc.

2. Information about the AATSEEL program: David would keep the current updated
version of the preliminary program there; there would be lists of panels &
chairs, etc.

3. Information about graduate Slavic programs: several graduate programs
already have their own Web pages. We would provide links to those and to all
others as they come on line. If departments are hopelessly "otstalye", we could
for a small fee provide a page for them as a service (if that's acceptable
policy). A well-designed dept. page would include links to request application
materials or printed brochures, links to send email to faculty or
administrative people; cvs and/or research statements by the faculty; course
descriptions and/or syllabi; perhaps links to any student-run activities such
as a Russian House, Russian Club, etc.

4. Information about undergraduate programs. This is harder to put together,
since it involves a much broader range of departments, with quite different
needs and offerings. But I can imagine a page on undergraduate programs,
hierarchically organized into regions of the country, or even states if we have
a lot of them, where the user would move to the school or schools s/he is
interested in. The schools would provide course schedules, major programs,
minor programs, info on extracurricular offerings, etc. As I conceive of this,
it would be of primary interest to high school students looking for possible
schools. Maybe someone else could focus this category better than I can.

5. Information about special Russian language programs. Here would go
information about US summer programs (IU, Norwich, Middlebury, etc.), either
via links to their own pages (if they exist), or established and maintained for
them, giving essentially the same information as printed brochures, including
the pretty pictures of people having more fun studying Russian than the poor
slobs in soft-drink commercials (!), with links for application forms etc. We
would also make available information about in-country programs, both the big
ones like CIEE, ACTR, etc., and the little, one- or two-school programs (like
the IU pre-Workshop study tour to Russia, which this year was combined with a
similar Michigan group). Even announcements about direct registration programs
in Russian (etc.) schools.

6. Information about research and grant opportunities. I have in mind all of
the following (plus any others I haven't thought of): local research and
support programs like the SSRC or JCEE/ACLS; research abroad programs, such as
IREX or Fulbright; programs to bring Russians (etc.) here, such as IREX or
ACTR; conference and short-term travel support (ACLS, IREX); and so forth.

7. Employment clearinghouse. Postings could include: job announcements, with
links to send Email to employer (if employer desires; they might prefer to be
left alone!); ad-hoc announcements such as one-shot translation work,
intermittent things, legal interpreting, etc.; in-country employment
opportunities, such as Pacific Architects, Russian firms looking for English
translators/editors for contract employment, etc.; maybe even "have gun, will
travel" announcements by people looking for any kind of Russian-related jobs.

8. Information about upcoming conferences, with email and web links to
organizers.

9. Research abstracts and publication information. This would require
substantial organization; here's what I have in mind. We could encourage depts.
to submit abstracts of Ph.D. dissertations, and post them here. We could
include current and/or back contents pages of major journals, if they would
make them available in computer form (we don't want to get into the retyping
business). We could also publish book announcements, such as the "Books
Received" list from SEEJ (does it have one??). We could definitely include
back contents and abstracts to SEEJ papers, as well as the full text of
major informational resources, such as review articles on textbooks or
electronic aids, historical pieces such as were published in the
anniversary issue a few years back, and so forth; indeed, we could do a WWW
version of an index! We could publish style sheets and editorial addresses,
for SEEJ and other journals (e.g., JSL). We could post announcements of
special-theme sborniki, Festschriften, etc., which are soliciting
submissions (with links to the editors' email addresses!).

10. Teaching materials. Here we could include listings of textbooks, with links
to publishers and/or authors, info about supplementary materials such as
workbooks, unpublished teacher's handbooks, or computer modules; electronic
resources such as Rich Robin's LCEN exercises (which seem to be deceased, but
something similar might return); public domain CALL materials (such as the
Polish for Everyone set which was recently made available); demos or samples of
commercial materials; and anything else that comes along. An updated SCOLA
schedule could be included. We could also maintain a pool of teaching
syllabi in undergraduate (hell, even graduate!) lit and culture courses.
Indeed, syllabi to "non-traditional" courses for our field might be an
invaluable resource to those of us who do more general courses and aren't
truly informed. So, one or two really sharp reading lists/syllabi for
professional-level course in Russian (E. European) music, cinema,
sociology, etc., would be great to mine for isolated materials for general
culture and society courses.

11. Russian (etc.) text corpora. There is a large set of Russian text corpora,
literary and non-literary texts, at infomeister.osc.edu, which are publicly
available; as well as smaller archives in other places. We could piggyback upon
these resources. Richard Paine's newspaper articles could be referenced here as
well.

12. Information about Russian (etc.) net surfing, i.e., electronic resources of
interest to our field. This would be a kind of hobbyists' corner. This would
include links to fonts and "Cyrillicization" software for all platforms, as
well as information about commercial products.

13. Selected contents from the AATSEEL Newsletter, enriched with links if
pertinent. For example, if someone publishes an article reporting on some
teaching method, with a few sample excerpts from exercises, the article could
be made available electronically with additional exercises. If a humorous
Russian story is published, a teacher might prefer to grab the electronic
version here (for subsequent editing or other manipulation), rather than Xerox
it from the Newsletter.

14. Non-scientific materials. For example, if someone gives an interesting
policy-type speech at a Vision session, perhaps the text could be posted here.
Or the Reflections columns from JSL (ahem). Reports of task forces such as
Olga Yokoyama's or Andrew Corin'ss. Enrollment information, if we are ever
happy with it.

15. ETC.! I'm sure there is plenty I haven't thought of; I wrote this at one
sitting.

4. SUPPORTING THE AATSEEL WEBMASTER

This would require some investment by AATSEEL; this may be problematic. Above
all, we would need a Webmaster. This could be a hobbyist, who would do plenty
of net surfing anyway, and can simply channel much of it into AATSEEL's
framework. For example, it could be a grad student, such as your Jake Jacobson
or our Jonathan Ludwig [who has now gotten his Ph.D., congratulations!],
who are good at this sort of thing and would spend hours doing it ANYWAY. I
personally think this person should be paid by AATSEEL, either on an hourly
basis, or by some flat rate, such as $2,000 for a year of support. I dunno,
maybe that's not enough. If we found the right person, the flat rate would
be a better deal, since the hobbyist really gets carried away by this sort
of thing.

We would also need storage facilities. Here, it's important that there be
continuity at some university. Pitt would be one possibility, since there
are people who could oversee and operate it; however, there ought to be
enough grad students (unless a faculty member takes it on, perhaps with
hourly work-study assistance) to maintain some continuity. Indiana would be
another; and perhaps there are even better possibilities out there I don't
know about. It
would need to be a place where they could more or less ensure continuity of
support AND staffing (i.e., multiple generations of Webmasters). At IU there
are new, non-mainframe Web facilities coming on line this summer, which is
nice, because they are easier to maintain. I imagine similar facilities are
available at many institutions, and I don't pretend to know about computer
resources at many of our sister Slavic Departments.

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George Fowler                    [Email]  gfowler at indiana.edu
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